18Professor Monica Wilson (1908–82), who was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town from 1952 to 1973. Previously she had taught at the University of Fort Hare and Rhodes University. Her famous monograph on the Mpondo was based on fieldwork for her Cambridge PhD and entitled Reaction to Conquest.
19Published in 1958, Borstal Boy is an autobiographical coming-of-age account of Behan’s three years of detention within a juvenile borstal during which time, despite his Irish republican allegiances, he comes to befriend a series of English inmates.
20George Bernard Shaw.
21W.M. Macmillan (1885–1974) was, in 1917, made the first professor of history at the Johannesburg School of Mines (later to become the University of the Witwatersrand). He is regarded as the founder of the liberal school of South African historiography.
22The title of Macmillan’s book, first published in 1927, was The Cape Colour Question and was based on the papers of Dr John Philip.
23Much is being left unsaid by Sobukwe here. It was while studying Native Administration at Fort Hare that the full extent of the injustices of apartheid became evident to him; this was a turning point in the development of his political consciousness and his commitment to the struggle against white supremacy.
24Sir Henry Barkly (1815–98) served as the Governor of the Cape Colony and High Commissioner for Southern Africa between 1870 and 1877, and was notable (given the current context) not only for being a supporter of the Cape’s non-racial constitution of the time – which he felt would not survive any negotiations with the Boer Republics for a confederation of South African states – but also because he played an important role in assisting the growth of the Cape liberal tradition.
25Also known (in colonial historiography) as the frontier wars and (by critics of colonialism) the wars of dispossession. “Kaffir” was already in the 1960s a pejorative racial term.
26Probably one of the wives of Botha Sigcau, a chief of Eastern Pondoland who was an early supporter of the National Party’s Bantu Authorities policy. Later he became the first president of the so-called independent Transkei.
27Gladys Mgudlandlu was a South African artist and educator (1917–79) who qualified as a teacher in 1941 at Lovedale College. She held a solo exhibition in Johannesburg in 1964.
28Sugar Ramos of Cuba, the defending world featherweight champion, was initially awarded a split decision over Floyd Robertson on 10 May 1964 in the first world championship bout to be contended in Accra. The Ghanaian Boxing Authority subsequently over-ruled this decision, declaring Robertson the winner.
29A quote from Isaiah 11: 17: “The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox.”
30Baragwanath Hospital, Soweto, where she was presumably studying as a nurse.
31Congestive Cardiac Failure.
32The well-known chorus from Handel’s Messiah.
33Deuteronomy 33: 27 reads: “The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. He will drive out your enemies before you, saying, ‘Destroy them!’”
34An African Student in China, by Emmanuel John Hevi, was published in 1963.
35Africa in the Communist World, a collection edited by Zbigniew K. Brzezinski (later, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor), first appeared in 1963.
36Psalm 91 (Qui habitat) is commonly invoked in times of hardship.
37Sobukwe is referring to the constant surveillance of his communications and, presumably, those of his comrades and allies.
38The Hoover Institution at Stanford University, California, is a conservative public policy think tank that also engages in publishing. The Hoover Institution would later produce a number of titles on South African politics, including a transcript of the Rivonia Trial. Pogrund is probably referring to Africa in the Communist World, edited by Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, which the Hoover Institution published in 1963.
39Central News Agency.
40Zachariah Keodirelang Matthews (1901–68) was one of South Africa’s most distinguished intellectuals. He was admitted as an attorney to the Johannesburg Bar before leaving the country to study at Yale and the London School of Economics. He was affiliated with Fort Hare for many years, as lecturer and head of the African Studies Department. In his thirties he became increasingly involved in political activities, particularly within the ANC. He lent support to the 1949 Programme of Action, served as ANC provincial president of the Cape, and proposed the idea of the Congress of the People in 1953. Matthews was one of the accused in the infamous Treason Trial, which aimed to persecute all those involved with the Freedom Charter and its aims of ending racial discrimination. He was held in detention for six months in 1960, after he played a key role in the calling for consultations among African leaders. In 1966 he was offered the post of Botswana’s ambassador to the US, which he accepted.
41Dr Robert S. Bilheimer (1917–2006) was an American Presbyterian theologian. He was one of the co-founders of the World Council of Churches (WCC), and it was in the capacity as WCC delegate that he met with representatives of the Christian denominations in South Africa to address the issue of apartheid in 1960.
42Reflecting back on this comment, Pogrund (2015: 210) remarks: “I was still plugging away trying to bring about his release. At this distance of time I cannot remember exactly what I tried to do. Whatever it was, it was done in consultation with Sobukwe and must have been unorthodox and risky.” A further point of contextualisation should be added. Pogrund (2015: 210) notes that as of May 1964 “the government’s wooing of Sobukwe was at an end. Once the realization came that he was not going to change his ways and was not willing to be co-opted, the pleasantness and co-operation were replaced by increasing obstructionism.”
43Camara Laye’s novel The African Child, based largely on his own childhood in Guinea, was published in 1953, and is one of the earliest major works in francophone African literature.
44The notion of an ‘African personality’ was invoked by African leaders and intellectuals such as Kwame Nkrumah and Kenneth Kaunda to refer to the cultural uniqueness among Africans as reflected in their attitudes, behaviour, beliefs, customs and societal norms. It referred also to the distinctiveness of explanatory frameworks – religious, cosmological – and the particular social and political systems that have developed historically across the African continent.
45Floyd “Klutei” Robertson was a Ghanaian professional boxer. He fought Sugar Ramos on 9 May 1964. Although Robertson was initially awarded the fight, the decision was later reversed.
46State-owned newspaper published in Ghana and established in 1950 by the London Daily Mirror Group.
47The 1956 religious epic produced and directed by Cecil B. DeMille.
48Fabian Ribeiro, “The incidence and treatment of iron-deficiency anaemia in an African general practice”, South African Medical